President George W. Bush brought Western wear with him to the White House — suits with cowboy boots, big decorative belt buckles, cowboy hats. President Barack Obama ushered in an era of slimmer suiting, while first lady Michelle Obama helped spark a renaissance of American design.
Presidential administrations always come with an aesthetic attached. What is striking about President Donald Trump’s is just how much others in his orbit — and even his grassroots supporters — have adopted his administration’s look, one which Today, Explained’s Gabrielle Berbey told me “masquerades as calling back to older standards of beauty, masculinity, and femininity, but in fact represents a whole new era of extremeness.”
This MAGA aesthetic speaks to something larger about political philosophy and policy goals in Trump 2.0. This was the case in the first Trump administration, too. To understand just what that something is, I talked with Berbey, who recently produced an episode of the Today, Explained podcast all about MAGA beauty standards. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Tell me about your reporting about MAGA aesthetics. When I hear that phrase, a specific image comes to mind.
What’s the look that comes to mind for you?
It’s very starkly gendered. For men, either completely clean shaven or bearded, nothing in between; with hair close cropped on the sides, but long on top. A bulky build, like you’ve been going to the gym a lot. A short-sleeved shirt — maybe made of some tech fabric — paired with jeans or chinos and some kind of boots, maybe combat boots.
Combat boots too? Those are MAGA now?
Haha, yeah, I feel like I’ve seen that a lot. And for ladies, I’d say long, wavy tresses, very full lips, sheath dresses that are fitted, but professional, very defined brows.
The hair is definitely bouncy. What you’re describing is very much what we wanted to look at in our episode. There’s a very noticeable, artificial, confounding look that many people in Trump’s immediate orbit seem to have.
In reporting our show, we focused on two different looks that speak to the same phenomenon.
There is a particular style of makeup that we see that seems to be favored by women on Fox News and women in Trump’s orbit. It includes some of the things you mentioned: blocky brows that feel very defined, bold eyeliner, and so on.
Beyond makeup, however, there are people — both women and men, but especially women — who seem to have gotten very visible plastic surgery.
We see a level of very obvious face alteration that is different from the sort of plastic surgery that we saw even just a few years ago, when people would take great pains to make it look like they hadn’t gotten any work done.
To be clear, no one in Trump orbit has come out and said they’ve had plastic surgery. Of the people often pointed to as examples of this facial aesthetic — people like Kristi Noem, Laura Loomer, Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Matt Gaetz, and so on — only Noem has admitted to any work, and only to dental work.
We talked to a reporter from Mother Jones, Inae Oh, who has looked into this quite a bit, and has really sat with the question of: Why do we see what appears to be really dramatic plastic surgery around Trump? And she’s explored the question of whether proximity to power — and specifically to Trump — relies on a very specific look.
That reminds me of a phrase we’ve often heard from Trump over the years — that a nominee or politician he favors is straight out of “central casting.”
Yes, that phrase is a helpful reminder that Trump comes from a reality television world, and is also someone that is quite obsessed with the pageantry of beauty — it was literally his business for a time — and is not afraid to say that.
Part of what we’re seeing is people in his circle looking like reality TV stars, in a way that is almost like a uniform — which some on the left disparagingly call Mar-a-Lago face. Maintaining a certain look seems to be an important part of getting into Trump’s orbit.
Does this look tell us anything else about Trump or his administration?
Something that Inae points out is that these looks seem to be connected with policy. You have extreme looks paired with extreme policies. Think Kristi Noem doing deportation glam in her DHS videos.
These extreme looks are a callback to a different era of plastic surgery. These extreme policies are a callback to a different time in the United States. There’s a reversion of both policy and aesthetic.
You used the word “extreme” there. Is there an effort to be extreme on all fronts? Is that one way to describe the connection between Trump aesthetics and policy?
I think so. Something that Inae points out is that Trump 2.0 is over-the-top in both policy and aesthetics, in ways that Trump 1.0 was not.
Over the top, like reality TV is purposely over-the-top, in its effort to provide maximum entertainment?
Reality TV really is a helpful way to think about this, in that it is something, much like the aesthetics that we see around these Trump adjacent figures, that relies on tools of distraction. You get caught up in the glam and ridiculousness, and you don’t notice what’s actually happening (or sometimes how there is nothing happening).
Inae points out that when you look at the ridiculousness of a deportation-glam, reality TV-ified DHS video, you almost forget that there are real people in those videos who are being deported, who have families, because the performance and aesthetics of it is so shocking.
As you were saying that, I thought, It’s almost as if Trump’s policies themselves have had plastic surgery — they’ve been given shiny, artificial faces you want to stare at, making it hard to see the reality underneath.
That’s a really good way of putting it. And that’s the case for talking about aesthetics and policy as a pair. Because when you just talk about aesthetics, it can start to feel very anti-feminist. People should do what they want with their face. But when you pair the brutality of the policies with almost brutal face augmentation, they feel connected and worth interrogating.
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